PERSONAL-USE ANDROID LOGBOOK
Offline-first. Opt-in buddy sharing.
Offline-first. Opt-in buddy sharing.
BassBuddy is a personal Android logbook built for bass anglers — the app you open at the water's edge to record a catch before the story fades. It runs entirely offline, keeps everything on your phone, and needs no account to start using. Built for remote SA dams where cell signal is a luxury.
Plan a trip from Home — pick a water body, set the date, invite buddies if you want company. When you start the trip, Open-Meteo pulls the conditions snapshot: temperature, wind, barometer, moon phase, and solunar windows. On the water, log each catch with species, length, weight, rod, lure, line, hook, technique, structure, depth, water temp, and a photo — everything writes to a local database, no signal, no cloud, no delay. Enter only length and the app estimates the weight from your own past measurements per species.
Over time BassBuddy learns how you fish. A lure suggestion engine surfaces the top three lures from your own logbook for the current conditions every time you open Log Catch. An OSM catch map pins every fish to where you caught it, colour-coded by species. A tackle box tracks rods, lures, lines, hooks, cost-per-catch, and a shopping list. Personal-best alerts and lightweight pattern hints (lure / baro trend / moon phase) fire on Save when the numbers back them up. Export to GPX or CSV any time; backups go to your Downloads folder or an SMB share you control — you own the data.
If you want to fish socially, enable Buddies from Settings. You get a pseudonymous 6-character handle you swap with other anglers — no email, phone number, or real name required. Buddies can accept your trip invites, watch a live trip as you log catches, and receive brag cards when you land a PB. What buddies see is limited to what you explicitly push; your full catch log stays private.
BassBuddy is free. No ads, no subscription, no in-app purchases, no "premium" tier locked behind a paywall — the APK on this page and every version that follows is yours to download and use in full, at no cost. That's not a limited-time promo; it's the model.
The reason is community, not commerce. There's no shortage of paid international fishing apps built for tournament bass in Texas or trout streams in Montana, but very little that speaks to the reality of a South African angler at Bronkhorstspruit at first light, a club member launching at the Vaal, or a weekend crew loading up for Loskop. This app is a personal project run at hobby scale, aimed squarely at building a shared logbook culture among the anglers who actually fish these waters.
Everything you see today — the tackle box, the lure suggestion engine, the catch map, weight estimation, brag cards, the Buddies network — is included in the free download. Every future release will follow the same rule: no paywalls, no feature gating. The Buddies feature exists precisely to grow that community: invite the guys you fish with, the club regulars, the guide who put you on your PB. The bigger the network of handles you know, the more useful the shared trip history becomes for everyone in it.
If you get value from BassBuddy, the best way to pay it forward is to tell another angler about it, file a bug at bassbuddy@xtendit.co.za, or send in a feature request. The roadmap is driven by what real anglers actually want on the water.
New: a free companion South African fishing waters guide — a browsable reference to 19 dams and river reaches across all nine provinces. Tap a water to see its hotspots (structure, working fishing depth, and the lure that suits each), the best months per species for bass, yellowfish, carp and barbel, the recommended launch for each spot, and tappable GPS pins that open the exact location in Google Maps. Plan the trip here, then log your catches in the app.
Read the full POPIA-compliant privacy policy. Quick version: if you never enable Buddies, the app makes zero outbound calls beyond Open-Meteo (weather), OSM (catch map tiles), and Maps URL parsing. The catch log lives on-device. Backups are local (Downloads folder or your own SMB share).
Bug reports, feature requests, POPIA data-subject requests, security disclosures: bassbuddy@xtendit.co.za.